The decline of Nicolas Cage from Academy Award winning A-list actor to a regular feature of the bargain basement VOD market has been going on for close to a decade at this point, but something seems to have clicked in the 56 year-old’s head at long last. After years spent signing on to almost everything that came his way regardless of quality, the manic thespian now seems to be singling out the most insane sounding projects available, which is a very good thing.
Having already appeared in extraterrestrial martial arts movie Jiu Jitsu this year, Cage’s next four efforts sound positively bonkers. Michael Sarnovski’s Pig might be a relatively straightforward drama, but the idea of the Con Air and Face/Off star playing a mushroom forager who falls into despair when his prized truffle-hunting porker goes missing is enough to pique the curiosity of many folks.
Willy’s Wonderland, meanwhile, sees him as a janitor spending the night at an amusement park where the various animatronic inhabitants come alive and try to kill him over the course of an evening, while The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent finds Cage as a fictionalized version of himself hired to act out his own movies at the birthday party of Pedro Pascal’s billionaire before he gets drawn into a conspiracy involving the CIA and drug cartels.
Next up, though, is action thriller Prisoners of the Ghostland, the English-language debut of subversive Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono, and you can check out the first images from the pic below.
The movie stars Cage as a criminal literally named Hero, who has to rescue a woman that’s been abducted and taken to a supernatural universe where he must break an evil curse that binds them together in order to save her. That certainly sounds suitably mad, making it a must-see for the actor’s fans.